The Longest Battle
by porcelaindakota
Summary: They suffer most in the waiting. Alfred and Bruce, Barbara and Jim.


Jim is late.

Barbara chances a second glance at the clock as she maneuvers dinner out of the pot—no, she hadn't misread the time. She knows not to be surprised—he's been picking up more hours at work, trying to pay the bills and save the world and who knows what else.

She goes to the cabinet. Her fingers rim the plates; they are cold and heavy. She takes in the kitchen she had so lovingly prepared for herself. It is filled with metal and stone, sharp edges and knifepoints. She'd spent months picking everything out, the counters, the cutlery, until she'd finally built her perfect kitchen, the room she would use to tend and nurture her family. Now she sees only an alien landscape she can't connect to, filled with the potential for disaster.

Jim is coming home later and later, and some evenings not at all. And even when he is with her, he is absent—not a week passes without Barbara finding her husband staring at his hands, unblinking and unhearing as the living whirl around him.

_The job_, as he would say. Gotham is eating him alive.

James Jr. chooses that moment to burst in, his bright voice bouncing off the walls, off his frozen mother. Barbara feels her face rearrange itself into the appropriate smile. James is followed by his sister, and the room fills with their warmth and color.

Barbara takes the lid off the casserole dish, laughs as her son and daughter exclaim at the billows of steam.

The clatter of silverware, the screech of chairs on linoleum, the chatter of her children, familiar footsteps in the hallway: these are life, revitalized.

* * *

><p>Bruce is dead.<p>

The lawyers have been telling him this for years, but Alfred has refused to believe it, refused to think he has so utterly failed at even that most basic task (_if anything happens, Alfred, please take care of my son). _

Today, though, the sky is overcast and the papers Earl sent over are on his desk, staring him down, forcing this darkest admission from him. Bruce has been gone seven years. Bruce will never come back.

(_Bruce loves you, Alfred. He trusts you. And there's no one else _we _could trust.)_

The words of a man two decades in the grave follow Alfred everywhere, as he walks through Thomas Wayne's empty mansion, tends to relics that no one else remembers. The photographs get him the most, pictures of the dead family Alfred has betrayed eyeing his every step.

Alfred lives in a tomb. It is dedicated to the Waynes, to Thomas and Martha and most recently Bruce, but Alfred's is the only body inside.

Earl's papers—_it's just a formality, and you'll get everything, anyway, I've seen Bruce's will—_lie before him, surprisingly menacing for their small size. Just a few pages, a signature on a few lines, and Bruce is, officially, dead.

The reporters have already been trying to reach him, calling the house for interviews, a few of the more intrepid banging on the door. When they come, Alfred watches from the window. This manor that does not belong to him blocks them out, keeps the world that could make him accountable far, far away.

It is this image—himself, inside this brick and marble tomb, with the rest of the noisy, questioning world removed—that plays in his mind as he picks up the pen and signs.

* * *

><p>Jim hasn't come yet.<p>

Barbara holds the entire world in her arms. She pulls her children as tight to her as possible, shields them from the madman that once was Harvey Dent. She knows exactly where they are—250 52nd Street—but she doesn't understand how or why. She only knows Harvey Dent is not Harvey Dent anymore, that he is pointing a gun at her children, and that the horror that is now his face will be burned into her nightmares for the rest of her life.

Harvey says they are waiting for Jim. He does not talk, other than to say they are waiting for Jim.

Barbara wonders what will happen when her husband does arrive. If Harvey will kill him. If Harvey will kill all of them. If he has anything worse planned, if she and Jim could together find a way to at least get the children out.

Everything else may spin madly on, but her world is nothing but this block of time, her hands at the back of her children's heads, a sliver of Harvey's still-human face visible as he stands behind a column. Her husband has turned into an abstract for Barbara. He is not there, but this entire world pivots upon him.

"Please," she says, her voice breaking. "Please just let the children go." Her voice shakes but she contains the sob in her throat. "I'll do anything… just let my children go."

Harvey doesn't move.

"No," he says. "We're waiting for Jim."

* * *

><p>Bruce hasn't come yet.<p>

Alfred carefully bears the trashbin containing the ashes of Rachel's letter out, as the television news blares in the background. He is careful as he goes about his work, leaving no traces of the secret he is destroying. Bruce will never know Rachel's last words to him. Alfred will spare him this blow, even if he cannot save him from all the others.

_Rachel. _The part of him that is a father feels, mixed in with the grief and pity, the smallest tinge of betrayal—that she could turn her back on Bruce, who had loved her and only her so well and for so long.

The news behind him plays on loop Batman's atrocities. Murdered cops, dead Harvey Dent. Batman is reviled; the city hates him and will hunt him down. Alfred's hands shake, and Thomas Wayne watches from the wall.

The terror has never gone away, not through all the dozens or hundreds or thousands of nights spent lying awake, waiting for footsteps in the hall or the horror of the phone ringing. But this is worse, so much worse.

Alfred pictures Bruce dead in the streets, his body face up like his father's. _Please don't take him again._

* * *

><p>Jim never came back.<p>

Barbara handed him his old GCPD duffel, packed with his things—she'd gone through his drawers and did her best to lovingly fold all his dress shirts (she hadn't spent her time as the Commissioner's wife, making sure he looked his best for the cameras, to watch it all go up in smoke.) She told him they should take some time to think, but if thought they should try, he could come back to her.

She watches Jim on television sometimes, or catches his name in the newspaper, but that's all he is to Barbara now, an image that is distant and untouchable, the cool of newsprint. He looks good, in way that are both familiar and new. He will be wearing things she recognizes, things she packed for him, but something insignificant like his glasses will change. Jim will stand the same way, wear the burden just as always, but the intermittent time will show on his face, lines in his skin or gray hairs she was not around to see.

It is strange, all told. Barbara still loves him, this man who was once the anchor at the center of her world. But it is a love that will never fill this gap between them; she does not know him anymore, and the day she moves on is the day she acknowledges this.

* * *

><p>Bruce never came back.<p>

He physically returned from that last night with the Joker, the explosion at Wayne Tower before that and the seven years he disappeared. But before Batman nearly tore the man apart, Bruce left Wayne Manor one winter night at eight years old and never returned; Alfred understands that now. Bruce remains in that alley, huddled over his parents' bodies. He has lived all the intervening years inside that horror.

And Alfred has spent these years calmly waiting, doing his best to give Bruce all the love and support he needed. But Alfred never forced Bruce to move on, to let his parents rest in their graves and raise his eyes to the world that had grown around their absence. It is his greatest regret.

It is not that Bruce lacks the strength, the simple tenacity to claw himself up and out of loss. Bruce is many things, but _weak _is not one of them. What Alfred has come to understand, as he watches Bruce weave through Wayne Manor's crowds, smiling and laughing and being entirely _false, _is that Bruce lacks the will. He has protected himself from more hurt for so many years, and he does not wish or know how to change. Everything until this point, from the years of adolescent acting out to his days fighting Gotham's worst criminals, has been a defense designed to do this very thing—to never have to face that pain straight on and then choose to rebuild over it. If he never chooses to move on, Bruce will never choose to forget his parents.

The Manor has risen again, bright and beautiful and strong over its ruins. In tonight's gala Bruce draws every eye, but Alfred could tell you every detail without looking, describe the set of his shoulders, the curve of his smile, the way his eyes will always wander back to his mother and father, frozen but immortalized upon the wall.

Alfred will never stop loving him, this man who is his son in all but blood, and ultimately he knows it will be the undoing of the both of them. His love, too gentle for its own good, will not allow him to force Bruce to confront his suffering. And Bruce will continue on his path, heedless of its lack of direction, and take Alfred with him. Their bodies age, the faces of their guests change, but Alfred knows now that he and Bruce will stay the same, standing guard over Thomas and Martha Wayne's ghosts as if Joe Chill had only pulled the trigger yesterday.


End file.
